OMNI Magazine Archive

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AUGUST 1979

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MIGHT OF THE G3NDGR

EARTH

1

PLAK£T OBSOLESCENCE

LIFE

MEAN lirUE BOTHERS-

□FFICIAL CIRCLES

THE ARTS

THE ARTS

inventor... or a kite designer, too. Today tneres App
Computer. It’s designed to be a personal computer. Tc
uncomplicate your life. And make you more effective.

It’s a wise man who owns an Apple.

If your time means money, Applecart help you
make more of it. In an age of specialists, the most ’ :
successful specialists stay away from uncreative
drudgery. That’s where Apple comes in.'

Apple is a real computer, right to the core. So just like
big computers, it manages data, crunches numbers, keeps

concentrate on what you do best And let Apple do the rest.
Apple makes that easy with three programming languages—
including Pascal—that let you be your own software expert.

Apple, the computer worth not waiting for.

q Visit your local computer store.

1^ You can join the personal computer

revolution by visiting the Apple dealer in
your neighborhood. We’ll give you his name
when you call our toll free number
(800) 538-9696. In California,

(800) 662-9238.

UFO OVER IRAN

UFD UPDMTE

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BY CARL SAGAN

<■ A kind of Galactic Survey
may keep an eye on
emerging worlds and seek
out new planets.?

timepiece
whose time nos come.

The Canon CardQuartz. Quartz accuracy
in a watch. Canon accuracy in a calculator.

®s

Canon

ELECTRONIC CALCULATORS

fiction

SANDKINGS

His interest piqued when told of the creatures'
proficiency for warfare and worship

BY GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

WIZARDS
OF SILICON
VALLEY

<m Judging from activity under
way, only the first harvest
of innovative products has been
reaped from the valley: 3

6 A generation that ignores history
has no past—and no future. You live and
learn. Or you don’t live iong.^t

i To be “matter of fact about
the world is to blunder into fantasy—and
dull fantasy at that —as
the real world is strange and wonderful. 9

Do not confuse “duty" with what other people expect of
you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt
you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed
voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail
anything from years of patient work to instant willingness
to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is
self-respect.

To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability
to unlearn old falsehoods.

This sad little lizard told me that he was a brontosaurus on
his mother's side. I did not laugh; people who
boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them.

Humoring them costs nothing and adds
happiness in a world in which happiness is always in
short supply.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully
human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman
whp has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make
messes in the house.

The more you love, the more you can love—and the more
intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on
how many you can love. If a person had time enough,
he could love all of that majority who are
decent and just.

DO

S&?.v ;

jgt

Are we starving the ocean
by not dumping enough garbage
into it? Are we ignoring the
Pacific as an ideal storeroom
for nuclear wastes? An
unconventional expert attacks
some sacred cows

IfUTERV/IElAJ

T he things he says would curdle the blood of any self-re¬
specting conservationist. For one thing, oceanographer
John D. Isaacs loudly advocates the storing of radioactive
wastes on the ocean bottom. Environmentalists say the wastes
would poison the planet. Isaacs retorts that “oceanic disposal of
atomic wastes may be the sea's greatest contribution to power for
humanity.” For another, Isaacs opposes sophisticated secondary
treatment of garbage before dumping it into the ocean. In fact,
I he'd like to see more waste in the sea. “That doesn't hurt the
w ocean," he says. “It helps it." Perhaps worst of all, Isaacs won’t
| even spare that great sacred cow of the ocean, the porpoise, from
I his caustic tongue. He describes the public concern over the
1, slaughter of this intelligent beast by tuna fishermen as being
>■ "woefully misdirected.” In typical Isaacs fashion, he seems more
| worried about the tuna. "Instead of demanding, ‘How do we stop
f the slaughter?'" he suggests, “we should be finding ways to
& preserve the populations of both predators—porpoises and tuna.”

Who is this madman, and why is he saying all these strange
things about the ocean?

John Isaacs, who spends most of his waking hours tilting at
popular notions about the sea, may just be the most creative
oceanographer and lover of salt water.in the world. He is no
headline-hunting amateur, but a man with impressive credentials
from more than 31 years of marine research and study. Since 1971
he has been director of the University of California's prestigious
25-year-old Institute of Marine Resources (IMR), based in La Jolla.
There he presides over an annual budget approaching $5 million,
which funds research and public information in a wide spectrum of
oceanic concerns: the nature of the sea itself, its contents and
boundaries, its interrelated processes, and the effects of man's
presence and actions.

Brimming with what he calls “modified optimism,” Isaacs most
enjoys destroying the popular notion that the ocean, poisoned by
man, is dying and that nothing can be done about it. "Nonsense,"

FICTION

d a good life, a good m

QUIETUS

Promising new research
may soon shield
us from an age-old terror

SHARK!

those of other fish, they are not set into the
bone but are attached to the gums. The
teeth form in rows, the row in front being
used and five or more rows of replacement
teeth waiting behind it. Shark's teeth don't
wear down. Always moving, the rows slowly
migrate like interlocking tombstones to¬
ward the front of the jaw, where they even¬
tually fall out. Within a lifetime a shark may
produce thousands of teeth. A whole row
can be replaced in as little as a week. Div¬
ers have reported finding high-tensile
cable completely bitten through, with the
unmistakable marks of sharks’ teeth cut
into the metal.

Facing these weapons, how can you
hope to get to shore safely if the shark
decides to attack? For that matter, what
makes the shark attack in the first place?

Not long ago Adrianus Kalmijn, working
at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, in
Massachusetts, isolated one key factor that
decides whether the shark will finally at¬
tack: Sharks have an electric sense.

snout, looking like tiny pinholes. The holes
communicate with an extensive system of
jelly-filled canals just beneath the skin.
Called the ampullae of Lorenzini, these
canals can detect electrical fields as weak
as one hundred-millionth of a volt per cen¬
timeter, a feat equal to detecting the
electrical field of a flashlight battery with

Every living organism, including a human
being, produces an electrical field in water.
Sharks always associate an electrical field
with their prey and can pinpoint their food

buried and invisible under the sand. Al¬
though the electric sense is effective only
within a few centimeters of the food, it is
very reliable. With it, the shark can zero in
on its prey when the odor and the light are
too faint to detect it by smell or sight.

Kalmijn has found that he can substitute

that look nothing like a fish but simulate a
fish’s electrical field. The sharks, dependent
on the electrical signal of the prey, will at- 1
tack the electrodes over and over again.

Though biophysicist Kalmijn is working
with sharks solely to study their electrical
orientation, the day may come when this

vice attached to your swimsuit could both
warn when a shark is in the area and deploy
electrodes around your body to confuse it
while you slip out of the water unharmed.

At three meters away from you, the shark
suddenly turns and swims off, shaking its
head violently. It will not return. You turn off
the device on your bathing suit and head

It seems reasonable to assume that an
effective shark repellent will be made in the
next few years. When that day arrives, you
will be able to enter the water without fear of
attack, and the shark, for so long the evil
monster of the seas, will finally become just
another fish. OO

JACK NEWTON DANIEL made whiskey
in 1866 by a method called charcoal leaching.
We say charcoal mellowing today.

Whatever you call it, you start with hard maple
from the Tennessee uplands and burn it to char.
You grind this charcoal to the size of small
peas and tamp it tight in vats. Then you trickle
whiskey down through the vats to mellow its
taste. Around 1945 we
changed the name of this
method from leaching to
mellowing. It seemed a
better way of describing it.

But that’s the only part
of Mr. Jack’s process that
needed improving.

Tennessee Whiskey • 90 Proof • Distilled and Bottled by Jack Daniel Distillery
Lem Motlow, Prop., Inc., Lynchburg (Pop. 361), Tennessee 37352
Placed in the National Register of Historic Places by the United States Government.

FICTION

It isn’t easy to reach paradise, even when
you devote all your
hardest labor and guile to the task

IMANDIHEHBH

BY JOHN ANTHONY WEST

PAINTING BY ERIC PAETZ

J

ALOFT

Weekend "astronauts ” fill the skies
BY NICK ENGLER -

• Slowly the hot air escapes
from the envelope, and the balloon sinks \
the ground, a writhing, dying dinosaur. *

. Mill IlllS SISK

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Aftate for
Jock Itch

is better
than
Cruex:

Really better.

Trial size offer.

liBB 11pi§§

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EXPLORATIOrUS

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HOW MUCH
WOULD YOU PAYTO-SEE
THE FUTURE?

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